Word: clermont-ferrand
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...string of fine films booked into the Harvard Brattle chain. An already legendary 1970 documentary by Marcel Ophulus (son of Max) it examines life in WW 11'S occupied France with a Collection of interview with national leaders, spies and various inhabitants Of the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. The historical view the film Presents may be fragmentary, even misleading; but the human range covered is Powerfully complete. We not only hear heroic, week, tragic actions explained, but get some inkling of what these actions meant to the rest of the lives of the participants...
...Sorrow speaks with a very personal voice. It deals primarily with ordinary Frenchmen and Germans who have reduced the Holocaust to forms of individual and family history. Helmuth Tausend, a German officer stationed in Clermont-Ferrand, first speaks of the war as a six-year separation from his new bride. Marcel Verdier, a pharmacist, refers to the obsession with food he and his countrymen developed. Pierre Mendes-France, who was Secretary of State before the collapse, recalls both matters of government and of the desire for small needs like kitchen matches. Those who struggled against the Nazis give personal, seemingly...
...there are the Great Men. Churchill, de Gaulle, Petain, and especially Hitler loom up before the Clermont-Ferrand landscape. But they, too, exist as personalities in individual memories: Hitler is recalled as favoring "harmless little liaisons" over inter-marriage, claiming that his soldiers' desire to marry French women was caused "by lack of sexual opportunities." Those famous men who are interviewed, Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France in particular, speak more of the times than of great events. Mendes-France, recalling his escape from prison, is reminded of the modesty of a young woman whose boyfriend propositioned her as they...
...content and the speakers are illuminated. The sense of the collapse grows; from the newspaper headlines, to Mendes-France's account of becoming a political scapegoat, to a former French soldier's remembered sense of bewilderment, to the reactions of the Germans, to the recollections of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, culminating in the newsreel of Marshall Petain 'offering his person' to France as he surrenders her to Germany. As the scratched words of the newsreel play on. Ophuls alternates between the aging Frenchmen of the present to the faces of the past...
Emile Couladon, Colonel "Gaspar", relatesnow customers will come into his store and claim to have been in the Resistance. As local head of the Resistance, Couladon knows they are deluding themselves, but what the hell, and challenging them would hurt business. Some of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand said that they saw no Germans in their town in 1942. There were...